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Saturday, 15 July 2017

The Captains And Kings Depart

In the press
there is the story about Kings College London and a debate about changing the
pictures on the wall of one of its departments. It is said that this is another
example of political correctness to please a small group of students from minorities.

They do not
want to be looking at some of the founders of modern Psychiatry, Psychology and
Neuroscience, in which Kings was a leader in research. They were around a long
time ago and all male, elderly, etc. etc.

The Dean of
the School says that it was an ordinary decision to rehang the pictures
elsewhere and replace them with diagrams etc. to help learning, which are
bigger than those online, can be more clearly understood and are nicer than old
men with the then fashionable fuzz on the chins.

It is
difficult to argue with this logic. The students now will spend little if any
time on time the early ideas of those sciences and will be concentrating on the
rapidly developing present. Much as their History department will have little
to say about The Battle of Omdurman once deemed essential.

The wooliness
of the reports could give the impression that the men in question were among
the founders of Kings, which is not the case. It was founded in 1828-9 after a
meeting of Church of England leading lights, chaired by the Duke of Wellington,
set up Kings to rival the 1826 University College founded by the Progressives
of that time and secular.

They were
joined in 1836 to be Colleges of the University of London, which grew and grew
in the next century and more. UC, which featured in the 1950's film
"Doctor In The House" became famous for drunken nurse chasing rugger
playing medic's training to be stalwarts of the NHS.

In the
meantime on the other side of The Strand, the Webbs, GB Shaw and others founded
the London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE. One famous member of
staff was Clement Attlee, so by the 1950's it had become heavy hitters in
politics, social sciences and history.

It's Director
between 1937 and 1957 was Sir Alexander Carr-Saunders, a leading man in the
Eugenics movement, whose research and ideas about race etc. became embedded in
much policy thinking and government in many countries in the first half of the
20th Century.

Hence
centralised planning and government with the authority of learned men who know
to tell the lower classes etc. what to do. You do not hear much, if anything,
about Eugenics any more. It has become one of the more embarrassing episodes in
academic history and LSE in particular likes to avoid any mention of it.

But one of the
twists of history was that when LSE was proclaiming Eugenics, over the road at
Kings something else was going on. It was Maurice Wilkins, Rosalind Franklin
and others researching into the base properties of humanity and living things,
DNA.

They and their
fellow researchers had something of a rough ride. But we know what happened
next. DNA has become a science central to medicine, archaeology, paleontology
and other sciences.

DNA tells us
that while we are all different in some respects we are all the same. I wonder
what Sir Alexander Carr-Saunders would have made of it, especially if on one of
the times I was on the carpet, I might have claimed it was the Neanderthal in
me what done it.

The Tour de
France this year heading out of Dusseldorf on day one went up the valley of
Neanderthal. So what is it in the DNA which makes a top cyclist?

Lastly, when
King George IV, above, the portrait is a little flattering, issued the Royal
Charter for the foundation of Kings College, not wishing to argue with the Duke
of Wellington, he could not have imagined all this.